When someone IMs, asks a ready reference question, and then uses language/spelling/sentence structure like, “What are the hours of this service?” I get suspicious. I have a hunch this was a librarian or LIS student seeing what kind of service they would recieve. If it wasn’t one of the above, it had to be an adult. Either way, they seemed happy and I counted it as an IM reference transaction.
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Comments
Though I haven’t done IM reference, I have called on IM tech support multiple times.
I will frequently write up my question ahead of time (sometimes in notepad, sometimes just writing it in the IM client and waiting to hit send), to make sure I don’t miss any essential points.
After all, users have time to prepare the first question.
Just providing a datapoint